stereogrammed

Yesterday was the first day I wore my rather embarrassing new running shoes. Publically embarrassing because I wore these Nike Air Pegasus to run errands rather than do my usual 7 miles, making me the kind of slovenly hausfrau that I usually get snotty with. But more secretly embarrassing: if you got up close to my feet, you’d have seen that the shoes’ bright red soft foam-fleshed tongues were monogrammed. As Courtney Love once said about herself, I say: “I’m not very good at asserting myself.” I custom-ordered these personalized runners from nike.com (shipped directly from the manufacturer in China!) despite the fact that I was the kind of kid who hated putting my name in anything. When we were forced to permanent-marker names onto gym tee-shirts or have mothers sew our names onto art smocks, it felt like defiling the purity of the object with the mere awkwardness of my identity: I hated asserting myself, my name, so tangibly. Even as a kindergartner, I was a Virgo. So it was the remnant of that feeling that came out yesterday when I was walking around with shoes that said, when I put my feet together: “JOONY SCHECTER.”

But in having this particular monogrammed thing, I wanted to create a different experience of a monogram. I felt like there had to be something between the polymorphous commercialism of the logo-monogram and the WASP-fascist possessiveness of the initials-monogram. In both of these traditions, the monogram functions as an aggressive assertion of the sureness of self. Corporate monogramming congeals the capitalist value of a company into one aesthetically attractive distillation of its name. The compacting of the company into cute little letters you can hold in your hand allows the consumer to transfer the company’s power upon the body through a public display of the wearer’s high credit line. (Even if it’s just posing: like my very FAKE Louis Vuitton Murakami)

After the advent of corporate monogramming, monogramming cannot simply be a practical way to never lose your bags. When you get your initials embroidered on to your possessions, you are saying that your name is as important as a corporate logo, and deserves to be branded on this poor helpless brainless shoe/ bag/ sweater/ handkerchief. You are asserting your ego to the world by displaying your power over the object. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, this idea is pushed to its limits, egotism morphing into terrorism: the monogrammed belongings of a beautiful and headstrong dead first wife are quite literally “possessed,” afflicting, even without its owner, psychological violence upon the meek and insecure second wife.

But what I like about Rebecca (not just the film, but the fictional character as well as the negligee case) is that here, the object seems to have liberated itself from enslavement to human and ironically, exacts revenge through collaboration. The objects monogrammed with Rebecca’s “R” are in a kind of ontological limbo. Even though their owner is no longer existing, the things bearing her monogram carry on as if she were still alive. They do what we imagine Rebecca would have done to the nameless second wife were she still alive. The monogrammed objects themselves constitute the feminine body of Rebecca. In the film, we never see Rebecca, but everyone in the film talks endlessly about her. So in fact, she is a text, a kind of living monogram. Or more accurately, it is the monogram that actually gives her flesh as a text.

This is the kind of monogramming that I’d want, but is there a way to merge flesh and thread through words without having to be dead? Is there space in the world of monogramming to have something that allows you to navigate between the free-for-all (who can afford it) legibility of the logo (self as object/ text to be possessed) and the taunting opacity of the personal initials (self as self-possessed body)? Something that allows you to be read as if your limbs and scent were printed words, and yet not compromise the fact that the sheets upon which the words are printed are in fact flesh, and inexpendably flesh: to have those words make sense as text, you need my body. This desire is part of a bigger desire to reassert that which is obvious, but is often taken for granted: the mind is an organ, a part of the fleshly body, just as the fleshly body is an alphabet waiting patiently for syntax and orthography.

Perhaps what was really embarrassing about wearing my monogrammed shoes was that I was kind of OK with it: that I in fact didn’t feel the full-on Virgoan embarrassment I should have felt. These shoes are the first things I’ve ever had monogrammed, and they are not monogrammed in the purest sense of the practice since “JOONY SCHECTER” is neither my initials nor my real/ official name. Does it count as a monogram if the name you’ve put in thread is actually a fiction? What if your things were monogrammed to assert not your ego but your alter ego?

Here’s another way to think about this business of fictional monogramming: Lindsay Lohan on the cover of Spanish Vogue, wearing a Dolce & Gabbana dress silkscreened with the image of Marilyn Monroe.

“Marilyn Monroe” is neither brand nor name in the traditional sense. It is the name of a human, but being the name of a famous human, is immediately recognizable and open to commercialization. Wearing “Marilyn Monroe” on her skirt, Lohan is asserting an aspect of herself that identifies with Marilyn (last year, Lohan posed nude for photographer Bert Stern to recreate Stern’s infamous “last sitting” with Marilyn): young white woman setting herself in aggressive ambivalence against a celebrity industry which simultaneously creates and destroys her. Thus, the monogram on the textile is “MM” but it telegraphs “LL.” Lohan expands upon and expresses her own feminine identity through the fictionality of her wearing “MM.” When her hair and make-up replicates MM and she is wearing a dress with the face of MM, Lohan is fleshing out the fictionality of her monogramming as “LL” through textual redundancy which becomes a decadent, heady textual overload. And in the paparazzi candids of the shoot, LL looks so happy:

I think I was trying to do the same thing yesterday, to feel similarly happy. I composed my outfit from the feet up: “JOONY SCHECTER” demanded fictional monogramming all over. So with the shoes I wore a vintage Hole concert t-shirt with the big pink “Hole” logo on the front:

A word shaped to invoke the band’s self-defining aggro-femme album Live Through This, but in the same vein, quite simply an aggressive self-declaration as feminine space of void. Which was then piled on top of a pair of A.P.C. “Supreme” jeans that have the words “Fuck ‘em!” stitched on the edge of the right back pocket:

Words of post-punky nihilism, monogrammed too close to the seam that covers over that alternate soft-cheeked fuckhole. Taken all together, the words on my clothes were redundant in a way that provides volume and dimensionality: monogrammed in stereo. The song: JOONY SCHECTER’S FLESH IS MADE OF TEXTS OF AGGRO-ODD FEMININITY. And I just remembered: the only thing in which I like writing my name is the first leaf of a book I just finished reading. This is not so much an act of declaring possession as it is a lick or a kiss for a loved one. And I’ve always wanted to grow up to be a book.

interiority decorating

Philosophy in the bedroom, literally: no Jacques Dutronc propped up on the passenger side pillow to make me feel like a worn-silk-wrapped Romy Schneider, but in his place a fat solid book of French psychoanalytic theory with the distinct musk of passionate intelligence (Félix Guattari’s Soft Subversions).

I’ve just moved into a new apartment, my third in my fifth year in Providence, and I’m determined to make a success of living it. Some people, like my dear friend Tracy, have a tremendous sense of interior space. Colors meld with furniture placement in a way that makes everything look squared off—like the furniture were given a good spinal adjustment. I am not so gifted. Maybe from too many years of playing dolls with no doll houses, my sense of interior architecture is miniature. Furniture makes no sense to me, and I have a sinking feeling that I make no sense to furniture. Many times I’ve been thwarted by ill-chosen dressers and side tables. So this time around, I think I will try to turn my handicap into an aesthetic.

The above self-portrait is a snapdash-ghetto attempt to mimic a scene from one of my favorite films of all time, Andrzej Zulawski’s L’important c’est d’aimer (1975). In it, Romy Schneider plays a has-been actress reduced to playing in softcore porn, trying for a comeback while being supported by an oddball husband played by Jacques Dutronc. The husband was a movie-mad fan of hers who basically stalked the actress into marriage, and their domestic sphere reflects this: they have scarcely any furniture, but do have piles of movie memorabilia strewn about the walls and floors. When I first saw the film years ago, I was moved by the interior design of the film as I was by its more obviously filmic aesthetic moves. The Scheider-Dutronc apartment was so messy, yet so orderly, and so so chic.

And its chicness had nothing to do with the latest issue of Architectural Digest or Elle Decor. The apartment was chic because the arrangement of things in the space became a material resonance of the film’s messy but intensely romantic emotionality. The title of the film translates roughly as “The most important thing is to love” and the film proceeds to unroll that most hackneyed romantic dictum from hermetic sentiment to functional philosophy. Schneider and Dutronc both know that their marriage is toxic, kindled as it was from his identity as a movie buff and hers as a movie star. But like a lot of poisons, their toxicity also nurtures them. Theirs is a weird kind of codependence (is there any kind of codependence?) in which their need for cinema actually allows them to hone and intensify their love for one another.

In his poem, “This Room and Everything in It,” Li-Young Lee writes:

I am letting this room

and everything in it

stand for my ideas about love

and its difficulties.

This is close to how the Schneider-Dutronc apartment works, but not quite. The apartment in L’important c’est d’aimer doesn’t just “stand for” an idiosyncratic love, it enables its expression. It is not just a representation of the couple’s love, but that love made tangible so they can better grasp and grapple with the complex emotionality of two humans. The bedroom of the scantily-furnished apartment is particularly naked: it has only a bed, and only a mattress at that, flopped on the floor amid a tornado-aftermath of clippings, records, books, and clothes. I’m not a movie actress, and I don’t have a movie buff husband. But I am a buff of (too) many things and I did have a husband. Even before I moved in last week, I decided not to use the bedframe that had been transported here all the way from San Francisco five years ago. The bedframe is huge and heavy, made of stony dark wood, with a giant curved square headboard: it was the marriage-bed of me and my ex-husband. It is pretty, but it no longer feels correct. It feels better the toss the war-torn mattress on my bedroom floor and let my life just arrange itself around it. I want my place—and we’ll start with the bedroom—to feel as if it is my brain turned inside out. I want a space that looks like chaos from afar, but up close, begins to look like art: instead of furniture, piles of things.

PILES: no shelves, no wall-hangings, no drawers. No hostaging or disciplining my things to “stay in their place.” No hierarchy through organization either (Sweaters in drawers and books on shelves? Not for me). Homes are usually furnished to display a missing human: chairs, tables, and even storage units arranged to look as if they are missing and longing for their humans, the humans who will occupy and touch and use them. In this way, the very idea of arranging furniture kind of always depressed me. Furniture always manages to look not only enslaved, but as though they exist only to wait for human contact. This is the traditional idea of “homey”: furniture that always imply the dotted-line outline of a human. I want a different kind of a home. I want my home to resemble a warehouse, but a tender warehouse. A tender warehouse is a place in which piles of things look careless, useful, arranged, loved, displayed, stored, but above all, where the things look like they are not waiting for anyone, instead, just hanging out with each other. A place where stockpiling finally gets the emotion it deserves. Where humans and things merge: piles of jeans collide with piles of French Vogue collide with piles of old diaries collide with piles of records collide with piles of words collide with piles of dirty t-shirts collide with piles of bones and skin and hair and breath.

madame inkmouth

Lipsticks should be like Sharpies: psychologically indelible. I like newness, but not trends. And in lipsticking more than any other body-fashioning cosmetic process, it is important to find a shade-brand-texture so your “own” that it feels like, as Maybelline says, you were born with it. Lipstick as permanent marker for your brain: the color can be wiped off at night so you don’t stain your pillow, but the feeling that it produces when you see yourself in the mirror should cohere to the girl in your brain. You and your lipstick ought to be inseparable, even if the lipstick is unworn and just doing timeshare in your handbag.

This is how I feel about black lipstick. I love a good red, but a good, uncompromising black is my other lover. A few weeks ago, at the Shu Uemura store in the Fillmore in San Francisco, I admiringly picked up their black lipstick BK 099, which is not dark plum, not brown, not brick, but straight-up Sharpie-black. Immediately, my friend Claudelle scrunched her face disapprovingly and exclaimed, “Ooooh! Joon!” The “Oooh” slipping into “EWWWWW.” I didn’t tell Claudelle that I already owned this lipstick. Instead, I just dabbed some on my finger and put it on my mouth. It surprised her: “That’s pretty,” she said. I looked in the mirror and agreed. I love the way a black mouth looks on me, but I hadn’t quite gotten a handle on the goth-hippie look it produces on my body (Although the look is worth exploring and working on, I think). But that afternoon in the Shu store, I hadn’t caked on the black. The meek fingertip application produced the look that results at the end of a day’s wearing a single swipe of black lipstick without retouching. After leaving black imprints on cup-rims, lunch forks, fried-chicken-greased finger, napkin, back of antsy hand, collars of t-shirts pulled over and under my head, and if I’m lucky, boys’ lips, my lips bear just the trace of black. The pigments of the black lipstick pressed into the cracks and crevices of my lips rather than its flesh.

It kinda looks as though I’d spent the whole day drinking red wine. But to me, this look is not so much cabernet-mouth as it is ink-mouth. Drinking ink along with wine is appropriate because Fall signals my return to teaching after a lazy summer. Fall for me is not a season to recharge my makeup colors, but to read (and teach) again Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, whose heroine, Emma Bovary, is the original inkmouth.

(Isabelle Huppert as Emma Bovary in Claude Chabrol’s 1991 film)

Overcome with shopping-debt that she can’t repay, Emma Bovary impulsively shoves a handful of arsenic into her mouth. Her subsequent death is excruciatingly protracted over the last thirty pages of the novel. As she lies dying, her lips are dyed black by the poison—her mouth is described as a “black hole”—and eventually, “black liquid, like vomit, flowed from her mouth.”

A woman’s death by overactive imagination, swollen sense of romance, and rampant shopaholism: it seems like a misogynist’s idea of a woman’s death sentence. Yet Flaubert, who famously cried: “Emma Bovary, c’est moi! (I’m Emma Bovary!),” has a radically different motivation for killing off his heroine. He tells us that as her mouth is lined by the black residue of arsenic, a “taste of ink persisted.” Moralists can think Emma’s death is punishment; for Flaubert, her death is liberation. It is the transsexual liberation of both Emma Bovary and Flaubert himself. Emma’s body begins producing the very ink that was used to make the novel. In this, she leaves the two-dimensionality of her fictional world—the very provinciality that would drive her to death and fate worse than death (bourgeois marriage and motherhood)—and makes her true flight to freedom into the third dimensionality of us, her readers. Black-inkmouthed, Emma realizes her true identity: novel. Emma Bovary is neither man nor woman, but book. She is a book trapped inside a woman’s body. Writing the death scene allowed Flaubert to make sense of his own inhibited transsexualism. His male flesh made thick and uncomfortable padding around the “Emma Bovary” that he felt himself to truly be, an “Emma Bovary” whose spine is not made of female vertabrae but glued and stitched sheafs of printed prose. In this same way, I may finally be realizing my own true sexual orientation as girl: I’m a book. (Probably more a short-story collection than a novel, though.)If we feel ourselves to be objects trapped in the body of fleshly human beings, what are we to do? There is an alternative to suicide: to take up femininity, fully embracing all the toxic risks that such an existence will bring in a world which denigrates both objects and feminine beings.

Walking around with black shit coating the cracks and dead skin on my mouth while pretending to be Emma Bovary may be a bit mad, and a bit ugly, but it makes me feel like a freshly-wiped intaglio plate of femininity: I want to be a reproduceable agent of renegade femininity. Actually, I probably am more low-tech than intaglio printing. I’m more like a pencil rubbing. You know: you write a message on a pad of paper and tear the secret sheet away, forgetting about the fact that a sneaky reader can rub some pencil over the next blank page and discover where you’re off to, who you’re seeing, who you are. Wearing black lipstick as a pencil-rubbing gives the feeling of being marked by femininity, by the risks of being a woman in a patriarchal society. And marked in such a way that all the next gal has to do is rub some BK 099 over me to find out the secrets of my successes and failures.

runs with pink ladies

To speak through Anaïs Nin: “I’m easily obsessed.” So it is with running. I’ve been running regimentally enough now (5.5 mile-trail, three times a week, since June, pace whittled down from 49 to 41 minutes) for the activity to gel into an identity. As a form of physical exercise, running of course carves fat off: my body feels almost Lindsay Lohan-ish now. As a form of psychic exercise, I could feel it adding to my hips and boobs. I knew this I became just as, if not more, excited about the September issue of Runner’s World as I was with that of Paris Vogue: Lara Stone styled like Scarlett O’Hara? Lovely, but I’m too busy reading up on the dangers of overstretching and the new Nike Lunarglide sneakers. So, as with all things in my life, it is time for me to measure the distance between “runner” and “girl.”

I suppose that the first and simplest way in which an activity becomes feminized is by being performed by females. In that, I felt vindicated upon learning that Mia Kirshner, a.k.a. my femme namesake, Jenny Schecter of The L Word, is also a runner (a triathlete to be exact). But of course, that an activity becomes gendered by the gender of its practitioner is a pretty boring, and I think, ultimately inaccurate concept. Rather, I find that more often, an activity is already gendered as a process, which gives gendering shape to its practitioner. But running seems pretty gender-neutral: moving your legs on a path while sweating doesn’t seem particularly feminine.

Or perhaps, moving your legs on a path while sweating isn’t recognizably feminine. In What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, his memoir as a runner-writer, Haruki Murakami writes: “I run to acquire a void.” He’s referring to the luxurious blankness of his mind while running, and I love that idea. But “void” is also the way in which women have traditionally been figured in Western thought, along with “hole,” “lack,” “castrated.” I like thinking about jogging’s mental paving as a paving of a brain-vulva: the vulval void as a luxury item rather than a handicap.

Weirdly enough, there’s another moment in Murakami’s book which displays a tangential awareness of this feminine link. Here, Murakami describes some fellow runners who pass him as he is jogging in Cambridge: they are girls, “Harvard freshmen,” he guesses. These girls are “healthy, attractive, and serious, brimming with self-confidence.” To top it off, they are “small, slim,” and have “blond hair in a ponytail.” What’s interesting is that this sketch is lodged in a chapter titled “Even If I Had a Long Ponytail Back Then.” Murakami, an Asian man, compares himself, rather competitively, with these gals. They might pass him in running, but he passes them in life experience: “these girls probably don’t know as much as I do about pain.” And sure enough, the girls’ inexperience with the dark side of life is symbolized by their running hairdos: “their proud ponytails swinging back and forth.” Murakami differentiates himself:

“But even if I had a long ponytail back then, I doubt if it would have swung so proudly as these girls’ ponytails do.”

This is probably why I hate symbols: it’s so laden, too easy. The ponytail here functions rather like a butt-face: you know, the frat house-y joke of magic-markering faces on beer bellies or butt cheeks. Here, the ponytail gets read as if it were a face. It is easy to scapegoat the ponytail as an emblem of the (presumably) white upper-middle class privilege of these Harvard freshmen because the “proud ponytails swinging” have the perky provenance of 50s white femininity. The original Barbie, Sandra Dee, and Olivia Newton-John as “Sandy” in Grease: bouncy, blond, innocent. The ponytail indeed swings up, balancing out their pert little ski-slope noses.

I like it that even though he is disidentifying from these ponytailed girls, the male Murakami (no femme is he judging from author pics) imagines himself with a long ponytail. Gender doesn’t seem a barrier to identification—even if he identifies to back away from that identification. Still, when Murakami says that his ponytail wouldn’t have a proud swing, I wonder if he takes his own metaphor seriously enough. Does he imagine that his ponytail wouldn’t swing “proudly” or that it wouldn’t swing at all—the swinging itself a prideful act akin to flagwaving? But if he still imagines himself a jogger, what else is a ponytail to do but swing?

Take it from this crow-haired ponytailed runner: the runner’s ponytail swings. When I used to run regularly six or so years ago in San Francisco (all those fucking hills!!), I was just growing my hair out for the first time, and also just beginning to accept my identity as a girl. When I’d suit up to run, I’d either braid my hair in a taught immoveable rope or a tight immoveable knot. I thought that to run with a ponytail swinging behind me would weigh me down. Boy, was I wrong. This year, I said Fuck It for the same reason I do most of the things in my life: I’m lazy. To my pleasant surprise, I found that the ponytail didn’t weigh me down at all. Actually, I rather enjoyed the swing of weight behind my head. It made me feel like Black Beauty, or Wonder Woman. I wouldn’t call this feeling “pride” but it wasn’t “shame” either.

And the ponytail doesn’t always “swing;” it also “whips.” Running by the bay, the winds can get awful fierce sometimes and many a day, my cheeks would get slapped by my own hair, or I would take in a mouthful of ponytail with my running inhale. Others might see a runner’s ponytail as swinging smugly, but to the runner, to the serious femme runner, the ponytail is like femininity itself: a thing that hurts you but a thing that allows you to make yourself.

Personally, I have two rather different, darker associations with ponytails. One, Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Rabbit Catcher”:

It was a place of force—

The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair,

Tearing off my voice, and the sea

Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead

Unreeling in it, spreading like oil.

I like to think that the void I’m acquiring while running is putting me in touch with this “place of force:” when the torque of the jog feeds me my own hair, I’m being possessed so hard by the women who lived before me that it feels like erasure.

The second, Helen Mirren on playing Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison in the BBC television series Prime Suspect:

Well, obviously, it was important that I looked like a policewoman, and so the hair was an issue. I'd always had long, blonde hair, and the general feeling was that it should be cut as I knew policewomen didn't, and don't, run around with long flowing hair, as people can grab it. So if they have long hair it's either tied back, or it's short.

The ponytail is feminine accoutrement as flexible armor to patriarchal violence. It begins in the playground: long hair makes anyone vulnerable to grabbing and pulling. The ponytail, while still more dangerous than a bob, allows the woman to retain an obvious femininity while performing a traditionally masculine act. Like catching criminals. Like...long distance running?

So while I probably also have nothing in common with perky blond ponytailed joggers, I feel more akin to them when I run than I do to old Asian men. I mean, come on. I jog in one of my favorite t-shirts: a pink Belinda Carlisle summer tour shirt from 1986. (I’m trying to wear it down to a particular transparency, down from Pepto pink to strawberry ice cream pink) My new Indian name: Runs With Pink Ladies. When I run, I don’t feel like Olivia Newton-John in Grease, the goodie-two-shoes who has to be lured into being sexy by her desire for a guy rather than by the seductive attitude of the girl gang, the Pink Ladies. Instead, I feel like Michelle Pfeiffer in Grease 2: the leader of the Pink Ladies, the eternal bad girl, hair whipping in surly defiance.

maternamorphosis

The four scariest strung together words in the English language: “I’M BECOMING MY MOTHER.” Lately, I’ve been thinking without fear about becoming my mother, and not for the usual boring Oedipal reason. I’ve been having some trouble this year trying to get my book of gender-race theory published. While wallowing in frustration, I found that my mother was going through a parallel pain, trying to sell huge oil paintings in this particularly nasty economy. Before I think of this woman who birthed me as my mother, I think of her as an artist. She is a woman who has a degree in textile engineering, who married and gave up a career, followed her future ex-husband to America, then with a couple of weird kids in tow, went to graduate school, got an MFA, and followed her dream of becoming a painter. But my mother was never headhunted by major New York galleries, and making a living as an artist has been a tenacious crazy-quilting of teaching and self-promotion. For years I’ve watched her struggle, and actually be happy in this struggle. Now it’s hit me that I’m doing the same thing she is, except my paint is the keypad of a computer.

The protagonist of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy says of his mother: “I have taken her place. I must resemble her more and more. All I need now is a son.” With me, of course, my mother is still very much living, and to be completely “her” I would need a daughter as well. But I like this idea that becoming your mother (no matter your gender) occurs way before you become a parent. In the above picture, my mother is about the age as I am now, except that she already has two children, the elder of whom is 9 years old. In my mind, this is how I always see my mother: arms crossed in defiance, hard eyes, jeaned legs in battle position. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to become, considering that physically, it is what I’m destined for anyway. Looking at this picture of my flannel-and-jeans clad mother, I realized that I already dress like her: I am a flannel-and-jeans clad mother-minus-son-and-daughter.

I want to turn genetic destiny into a personal style. Lacking a uterus, and determined that my sperm will remain deadstock in this world, I want instead to dress like my mother in her 30s. But in copying her look, I don’t want to turn to any recognizably symbolic or iconic pieces of traditional femininity. For instance, I’m not going to do anything with her long-sleeved, high-necked dark butterfly print chiffon dress except keep it hung up like a painting. The femininity of my mother that I want to locate for myself is a less intuitive one. One that I know is there but was not always an apparent part of her life as “Mother.” I like to think about my mother as she would have been if she’d never married the man she didn’t like, if she’d aggressively used birth control nine months before my birth. My mother if she’d never been “mother.” I like to think about my mother as never needing to protect and swath her procreative areas with soft skirts, but pack them into a pair of hard tight jeans. I want to wear my mother’s jeans. Not “mom” jeans but “mother” jeans.

Not that “mom jeans” and “mother jeans” are unrelated. Mom jeans connote those jeans produced in the late 70s and most of the 80s, with a singular cut: high waist, give in the hip, restraining at the butt and thighs. The curvy silhouette that their seams suggest led to these jeans being named “Mom”—cuddly, nurturing, soft, feminine body. But the historiography of mom jeans is a little misleading, because they were actually not made for bodies intent on being comfortable as pie-baking moms. Look at this priceless instructive label from a pair of mom jeans made by Levi’s (from my personal collection):

What a cute text. The girl puts the jeans on and is sweating-crying in flabbergastation because they fit so ill; she looks like she’s wearing a barrel, an extra in a Loony Tunes cartoon. But never fear: the jeans themselves tell her to “wash ‘em HOT inside out” and tumble dry them until they have a HOT fit: “the MORE you wash ‘em the better they look and fit!” The “after” picture shows the same crying girl now all in smiles, with jeans tightly hugging her curves. This arduous process of making your jeans look HOT with hot water and air seems akin to churning butter. In this age in which elastine has invaded the jeans world, gals hardly need to go through a particular process in order to get the tight femininity they want from their jeans. But if this anachronism is what makes these particular jeans maternal, they are hardly “Mom.” “Mom” implies familiarity, ease, mundane comfort. These jeans are not actually that. These jeans are a process of becoming intimate with an unyielding and unfamiliar object, to make it get to know your body, to get your body to get to know the breathing pattern of a textile. So let’s give due dignity back to these kind of jeans, which were not always soft and comfy, but only became that way because their original identity is hard and unyielding: “MOTHER JEANS.”

The Welsh singer Duffy says of her own mother: “Always a good pair of tight jeans—that’s what she taught me. She used to sit in the bath for hours trying to make them fit.” I like it that maternal pedagogy here doesn’t have anything to do with nurture, kindness, or warm milk, but crafting the perfect denim pedestal for your butt. My mother never gave me this lesson explicitly, but I like to think that a woman who wore tiny miniskirts in 1960s Korea and fearlessly yelled back profanities to boys who made lewd insults would have gone in for some hard jeans that required hot water baths to grow accustomed to her body. The fabric of my mother’s jeans in that defiant photo doesn’t look particularly hard but I like to imagine that they once were.

Even if “Mother” is an identity that is granted by the use of one’s uterus, why should it automatically have a “soft” cultural identity? I never thought of the womb as a squishy place anyways. It seems less like a warm wet cavern and more like an industrial workshop in which fetuses are stamped out. Like the reverse of a callous: a hard skin that becomes soft with use. Mother jeans are hard jeans designed to give a hard outline to a soft shape. My mother may not have worn hard jeans, but she’d weathered enough shit in her life to give meaning to their designation. Mother jeans should produce hard femininity. After all, my mother expelled her children not through soft natural childbirth but a caesarian. Every time I put on my hard jeans, I’m stepping into the depths opened up by a gaping sliced mouth on my mother’s belly, and her legs are my legs.

the future of me is tori

I went to see Tori Amos and all I could see were a pair of hoof-like Christian Louboutin pumps attached to her ankles. All through the two hour set, while my ears took in the music, my eyes could only take in the telltale blood red soles of Tori’s black suede pumps, which glowed like menacing devil eyes as she shifted and spun spread-legged on her piano stool. I had a pang of feminist self-reproach: did I really have to reduce a female performer down to a disembodying object? But my guilt was short-lived, as I observed multiple women of various ages and sizes and hippie-dom concentrating upon that crucial inch between their eye and that of their cell-phones. The girls who were losing crucial seconds of Tori’s piano-playing and singing to focus on taking pictures with their cameras were no better and no worse than I: feminine objectification is not what it used to be. The memory-cards in those girls’ phones and my brain contain the same image: a woman bisected by a black block.

Tori and I have come a long way, baby. When she first became “Tori Amos” back in the early 90s, she used to perform in a black nylon swimsuit top and baggy faded Levi’s 501’s, frizzy hair tied back carelessly with a scrunchy. Now she’s in Louboutins. Back in 1992, I couldn’t even afford to go to her concerts. But now at my fourth Tori show, I’m paying $75 for excellent seats (Orchestra, Row E), feeling her voice vibrate through my YSL Besace bag that contained a worn copy of Marx/ Engles On Literature and Art. Yes, Tori and I now have different relationship to feminine objectification than we used to in our twenties.

After the concert, I drew out on paper this Tori in my brain and thought a lot about what it meant to be such a girl cut in two. I thought about a particular lyric of hers: “What if I’m a mermaid/ in these jeans of his with her name still on it” because lately, I’ve been strangely attracted to old Levi’s 501 jeans from the late 1970s to early 80s. With the specific late 70s/ early 80s sizing of 27X34, you get a very special fit. Inseamwise, they are definitely narrow tapering drainpipes, but the silhouette is tight without being skintight: they give you a bit of a wrinkle. They are like lo-fi skinny jeans: tight jeans before they started adding 2 percent or more elastine to every bolt of denim. I imagine these jeans as having the name of Tori still on them—the kind that she wore when she first started out. When I wear them now, some 20 years too late, they make me aware of my body in a weird way that I like. The crotch seam hugs my body way too tightly, so that from the back it looks as though my anus is devouring the seat of my pants. Or, as if I were being cut in two by my jeans.

Being split down the middle by the seam of my jeans forced me to arrange my body in a different way. The tightness of the groin area posed a radically more difficult problem: it was putting my genitalia in relief. When you wear hi-fi skinny jeans, the elastic element of the denim acts as a kind of bandage or girdle that pushes down your bump into a lovely smooth crotch. However, the faded, thinned-out 100 percent cotton of the old Levi’s has an idiosyncratic stretch that just molds around the cock, rather than putting to due submission. As a gal, it made me feel very self-conscious and made me want to start tucking like a true drag queen. But after a few adventurous outings in the jeans, I realized that if I just stick my ass out a wee bit in just such a way, the whole crotch moves backwards while the denim stays forward, creating a little concave in which to nestle the candy: ghetto tucking! It’s precarious jean-wearing, but it makes me walk like a homeless cat (a new amble I like), and the blade of the crotch-seam is a constant reminder of Tori cut in two.

Tori has always been bisected by a black laquered block stamped with gold letters that spell “Bösendorfer.” I’ve just never been close enough to the stage to see it clearly. But if the piano is the thing that produces the objectifying cutting of Tori’s bodily integrity, it is also the thing that has been most closely associated with her. It is the musical instrument of her choice. When we listen to her records, we hear the piano as a tool of virtuosity. But when we see her on stage, the piano is the black bar that comes out from nowhere and takes out the midsection and arms of her body. Then, we no longer see the piano as just an extension of Tori’s musical identity. Instead, we witness the unholy collaboration between two machines—female and piano—that we know colloquially as “Tori.” In being bisected/ objectified in this visual way, Tori does become objectified, as in less human, but I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing.

“The dancer combines with the floor to compose a machine under the perilous conditions of love and death,” write Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. And this is how I think of the “girl” that emerges from Tori and piano. This is no ordinary objectification-by-female-vivisection. Tori must allow her visual self to get cut up by the black bar of the Bösendorfer in order to make the music that fills a huge room. This cutting is the “perilous conditions of love and death” that is necessary for her to accomplish her creative combining with piano. The head provides opening for the voice and houses the brain that remembers lyric and melody; the legs mechanise the Louboutined feet that pedal the piano. If what we’re left with is an object, it is not a corpse, it’s not something that used to be human, but something that a human will be, a revolutionary statement of the contemporary body: all you need is a head and legs to be this kind of “girl.”

professional ex

Last week, on a well-lit evening the Friday before July 4, at a bar, I met a pleasant stranger. He was my ex-husband. My sister took this photograph of me and my ex-husband and I’ve been staring at it off and on every day. Immediately after we divorced two years ago this month, I took to staring at photos also, but in a very different way, for a very different function. I’d clutch and predictably tear-stain old photos (physical pictures that were seen and developed by strangers at the Rite-Aid photo lab—we didn’t have a digital camera during our marriage). Photos of both of us grinning like idiots at each other, or else one of us grinning into the camera held by the other. I was obsessed with the happiness of love that was no longer felt, only locked into these sheets. The photos allowed me to indulge not only in lost love, but lost wifehood. Because my romantic anthem has always been the militaristically feminine shouting of Emily Dickinson:

I'm "wife"—I've finished that—

That other state—

I'm Czar—I'm "Woman" now—

It's safer so—

How odd the Girl's life looks

Behind this soft Eclipse—

I think that Earth feels so

To folks in Heaven—now—

This being comfort—then

That other kind—was pain—

But why compare?

I'm "Wife"! Stop there!

(199)

I’m “Wife”! Stop there! To me, being a “Wife” was the same as being a czar, to the creator of a soft eclipse, leaving behind the pain of that hesitant pack of solitary years known as “Girl.” After being dumped (let’s be specific about the means of the divorce) I was once again cast behind the eclipse, back to that old familiar hurt that rendered me incapable of uttering exclamation points. I was drawn to the photos of happier wifey days like a pure addict. But soon enough, I reached a visceral threshold; I couldn’t look at the photos any more. I overloaded on memories, and the euphoria of hurt just became, hurt. The buzz flowed over the rim of my psyche, and I locked the pictures away.

The truth is, while our divorce was hurtful, it was not bitter. My ex-husband and I have met and talked since becoming strangers. We’ve even had some nice, amiable hanging out over drinks. But before last week, no one had ever documented such moments. Thank God for little sisters with brand new i-phones. I didn’t know I looked like this talking to my ex-husband. I imagined that I’d be stiffly distant, a hopelessly plastic smile tarped over my teeth. Trying hard to get over it. But in this photo, I look relaxed, I’m listening, slouch-postured as always, my hair falling towards that man with the beard, unafraid of intimacy. I don’t feel pain looking at this photo—and my ex’s new boyfriend is even in the picture! (His head looks like it’s going into my skull.) The shock of this photo: I recognize myself! I mean, I recognize the girl that I carry around in my head every day. Which is no longer “ ‘Wife’—Stop There!”

So I had been married for almost ten years before our divorce. Of course being homosexuals, we were never legally married, even though we were in San Francisco, having already been living together for a few years and wore wedding bands when Gavin Newsom started handing out marriage certificates to gay couples from City Hall. But by that time, the legal ceremony seemed to us boring, unnecessary, or too much effort for a lazy-ass couple with a comfy case of bed-death. Or perhaps we were protecting ourselves from our induction into the grand gay divorce statistic. Whatever the reason, I am no longer Wife, I am Ex-Wife, I am Ex, I am X that marks the spot. I am the girl who enjoys, rather than creates, soft eclipses. But with a difference: a girl who’s back from the vacation of marriage.

My enjoyment of the photo of me and my own ex makes me realize that I am ok being an ex. I guess the real test might be yet to come: will I cry a little this coming Monday if Tori Amos plays “Doughnut Song” during her set at the Oakland Paramount Theatre? Maybe, but if I do, big deal. That’s what Exes do. I will enjoy being an ex to the extent that I’ll embrace it as some sort of feminine identity. Yes, my ex- husband and I had our time in the sun and can never fall and be in love the way we used to be. That’s what a divorce means. But being an ex means that I can still think about these past ten years of my life—those years with him—as a part of my present. Because what significance did marriage have for us? What real role did it play in our lives? My idea of love is what the philosopher Félix Guattari abstracts from “homosexuality”: “a kind of collective set-up of enunciation, a collective way of perceiving everything that happens.” We saw things together, we spoke back together to those things we saw. And that kind of perceptive reaction to the world can’t be unlearned because your husband divorces you, and you become not only his, but simply an, ex.

Not the black widow. Not a runaway bride. Not a serial monogamist. Not a girl who needs to be married, but a girl who likes to carry the stain of marriage. Just a boy who was some guy’s wife for most of his twenties.